Origin of the Cathari.

9

Messianic prophecies, and in general for all those passages of the Old Testament which are quoted in the New.

While the evangelical dissent of the Middle Ages was of indigenous origin, their Manichæism was imported from the East, as is attested by the Greek term Ka@apoi,* "Puritans," by which its adepts were designated. Some poor creatures who were burnt at Cologne in 1146, said that their doctrine had been preserved in Greece from the times of the Apostles; and this tradition seems to have been general. A trace of the early preponderance of Sclavonian Catholicism over that of other countries is perceptible in the fact, that the three principal orders or schools of the sect were called, respectively, the Tragurian, (from Trau, a Dalmatian sea-port,) the Bulgarian, and the Sclavonian. At the Council of St. Felix, (near Toulouse,) in 1167, the French and Italians present submitted to the decisions of the Catharic Bishop of Constantinople, because he was supposed to be more cognisant of the traditions of the primitive Church. Schmidt and Reuss observe that the use of the Doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer by the Cathari is a feature of resemblance to the Greek and Sclavonian Liturgies; it is wanting in the Vulgate of Matt. vi. 13, and is not used by the Church of Rome. However, Schmidt's supposition that the Albigensian version of the New Testament was not made after the Vulgate, but after an original Greek text, has not been confirmed by the examination of the manuscript of Lyons. The apocryphal books received in the sect were of Greek origin, being the old Gnostic " Vision of Isaiah," and a pretended conversation between our Lord and St. John. The name Bulgare, and by contraction Bougre, frequently given to heretics in France, and associated with the foulest calumnies, is no certain proof of their Oriental origin; for it does not occur before the thirteenth century, and may have been brought from the East by crusaders who had met with Dualists there. The same remark applies to another current term of reproach, Poblicans, which is understood to be a corruption of Paulicians.

We hope, at a future period, to study the history of the Waldenses, but must confine ourselves, for the present, to their heterodox contemporaries. The origin of the Cathari is shrouded in mystery. Many writers have supposed them to be the lineal representatives of the Manichees of the third and fourth centuries; but Schmidt, who is certainly the most judicious writer on this subject, has shown this opinion to be inadmissible. The heresy of the Middle Ages is a much simpler and more popular system than the subtle religious philosophy of Manes; it is altogether devoid of the mythological elements

Hence, by corruption, the German Ketzer, applied to all heretics.

which that heresiarch borrowed from the religion of Persia, and contains no astronomical or cosmogonical fables as the envelope of metaphysical ideas. According to the Manichees, the creation is the result of the union of the soul of the world with matter; while the Cathari taught that the whole material creation was exclusively the work of the evil principle. Above all, there is among them no trace of the profound personal reverence for Manes, and worship of his memory, which was one essential characteristic of the genuine Manichees, who looked upon their founder as the Paraclete promised by Jesus to His disciples. The Priscillianists succeeded the Manichees in the West, and the. Paulicians in the East; yet these latter, properly Syrian Gnostics, execrated Manes. The Paulicians were thought by Mosheim, Gibbon, and Maitland, to have been the immediate religious ancestors of the Cathari. It is well known that numbers of those religionists were transplanted into Thrace by Constantine Copronymus, about the middle of the eighth century; and Petrus Siculus, who visited the Paulicians of Armenia about 870, was informed of an intended mission to strengthen their exiled brethren, and to tempt the infant faith of the Bulgarians. Yet the Paulicians had no rites or ceremonies whatever, no ecclesiastical or hierarchical organization; they were strangers to ascetic abstinence from animal food, and did not condemn marriage. Such radical differences as these will not allow us to suppose the heterodox movement of southern and western Europe to have been a simple transplantation of Asiatic Paulicianism, though this sect may have contributed in some measure-more or less directly to the formation of Catharism. The fact seems to be, that Dualism manifested itself in Christendom at different periods, under various successive and independent forms. Imperfect and superficial reflection on the relation of the world. to God, and on the origin of evil, can so naturally arrive at the doctrine of two opposite principles,-one, the Father of spirits and Author of all good; the other, the author of matter and of evil,—that we are not obliged to suppose the doctrine was transmitted ready-made from pre-existing sects. There is a strong tendency in human nature to transfer sin from the real self-from the moral man-to a something else immedi-" ately without and around him: the physical laws of his own material nature and of the world are treated as intrinsically evil, or leading to evil, while the true culprit-his selfish and rebellious will-escapes detection. This is the principle of all the austerities of Paganism. A dark instinct of a state of abnormal and dangerous antipathy to God leads the devotee to take vengeance in time upon that part of himself which is outside, and which may be hardly treated, and even tortured, at far less cost than the renewal of the spirit of his mind, and

Spread of Dualism amongst the Sclavonians.

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the bringing of his whole inner man back to gravitate towards God, instead of turning upon itself. Manes endeavoured to unite Christianity and the noblest form of Oriental 'Paganism in his brilliant and elaborately constructed speculative system. The Church repulsed the heresiarch because of his personal pretensions, his rival Hierarchy, and his too open importations from the religion of Persia; but it was not the less profoundly modified by the tendencies which it nominally rejected. Monasticism in Syria and Egypt was the direct result of the contact of degenerating Christianity with Pagan habits of thought. The idea that abstinence from food was meritorious in itself, the notion of impurity attached to the sexual relation, the growing tendency to look upon marriage as a state less holy than celibacy, these were so many triumphs of the invading Pagan conception. The errors and extravagancies of the ascetic life were especially prevalent in the Eastern Church. Schmidt quotes authorities to show that remembrances of Manichæism were long kept up in Oriental convents, and also that sundry Greek monks, in their solitude, imagined they had constantly to struggle with the devil, whose power they magnified until they put him almost on a rank with God. Here were incoherent beginnings of Dualism, which only required favourable conditions to become a regularly developed and proselytizing system; and those conditions were presented by the state of the southern Sclavonic population, during the ninth and tenth centuries. The Christians of Moravia, Bohemia, Croatia, and Dalmatia, were then upon the frontier between the Greek and Latin Churches. The majority had connected themselves with Rome, and their Apostles, Methodius and Cyril, had obtained for them, from Pope John VIII., permission to use the Liturgy in their native tongue, instead of Latin: but this permission was soon recalled, edicts were made by several successive Popes against the use of the Sclavonic tongue and peculiar national rites, and those Priests who persisted in their use were driven into Bulgaria, where they were received as martyrs. Many convents long persisted in secret in the use of the national Liturgy, and underwent persecution when the practice was discovered: thus the monks of Sasawa, near Prague, were twice expelled from their convent during the course of the eleventh century, and were accused of heresy as well as of inordinate attachment to their language. We can easily conceive that communities at once forcibly separated from the East and irritated against the West, with a foreign and domineering Clergy as the representatives of orthodoxy, must have been peculiarly susceptible of originating or entertaining heretical speculations.

We know that, during the Middle Ages, when the real attractive power of the Gospel was so little understood, the

rude missionary endeavoured to lay hold of the imagination of his auditors by images of terror, and the devil was frequently the principal subject of his preaching. This abuse led some of the Sclavonian Pagans, during the interval between their undisturbed faith in their national mythology and their conversion to Christianity, to add to the worship of a supremely good being that of a supremely evil one, under the name of Czernebog, (Black God,) or Diabol. They actually borrowed the devil, before they received the Saviour, of Christian theology! When people under such impressions abandoned their old idolatry, and became outwardly attached to the Christian Church, they must have offered a propitious soil for the dualistic scheme.

However originated, Catharic Dualism found its way through Bosnia and Dalmatia into Italy, and thence into France, towards the close of the tenth century. A small current also reached North Germany through Hungary. We know little about its success in Greece, except that, in 1097, the Crusaders of the army of Bohemond, Prince of Tarentum, when passing through Macedonia, were told that the population of Pelagonia was entirely composed of heretics. They surprised the city, and butchered its inhabitants, without even acquainting themselves with the nature of the errors they punished so fearfully. The presumption that this ill-fated people were Cathari, is strengthened by the fact, that, in the following century, a Bishopric of the sect existed in Macedonia. The first public appearance of the Dualists in Italy was between the years 1030 and 1035. The Countess of Monteforte, near Turin, protected for many years one Girard, an enthusiastic teacher, who reckoned many noble families of Lombardy among his partisans; but the castle of Monteforte being besieged and taken by Heribert, Archbishop of Milan, Girard and his brethren were burnt to death upon an immense pile at Milan. In France there was an earlier indirect intimation of their presence, in a paragraph of a Confession of Faith published by Gerbert, so far back as 991, upon his election to the Archbishopric of Rheims: "I believe that the devil is not bad by nature, but by an act of his will; that the Old and New Testaments have one and the same Author; that Jesus Christ has really suffered, did really die and rise again; that neither marriage nor the use of meat are to be condemned." We find Girald, Bishop of Limoges, endeavouring to stop the progress of the new Manichæans in 1012. Many of them were put to death at Toulouse in 1022. The chronicles of the time attribute the first diffusion of the error to strangers from Italy, and complain that it was spread through all the provinces of Gaul. In this same year (1022) an execution of heretics at Orleans attracted the attention of the whole kingdom. Almost all the Canons of the Collegial Church of Sainte-Croix in that

Religious Excitement in the Twelfth Century.

13

city had adopted Manichæan notions, which were propagated in secret by Lisoi and Etienne, two zealous, able, and popular Priests. King Robert, having had secret information about their doings, sent an emissary to Orleans, a Norman Knight, who, by pretending to become a proselyte, procured admission into the nocturnal meetings of the heretics, and afterwards denounced them. A Synod was then held before the Archbishop of Sens, with the King and Queen in person. The assembled Prelates having condemned the heretics, Queen Constance struck Etienne-who had once been her own Confessorwith her cane upon the face, and put out his eye; then the two leaders, with Herbert, Chaplain to the before-mentioned. Norman Knight, and ten Canons, were burned to death outside the gate of the city. Three years later there were similar executions of Italian Missionaries and their adherents at Arras. During the rest of the eleventh century, the menaces and excommunications of local Councils, and passing records of the zeal of particular Bishops, indicate from time to time the existence of proscribed religionists in the South of France. We may notice an order of Pope Alexander II. to the Prior of the Hospital at Beziers, to refuse sepulture to the bodies of persons dying out of the communion of the Church, and to have those who were already buried dug up, a disgusting exhibition of sacerdotal vengeance, which was afterwards exercised towards the remains of Protestants, and has only got into disuse within the last hundred and fifty

years.

The beginning of the twelfth century was marked by an increase in the opposition to the Church of Rome. Pierre de Bruys, who began to preach in 1106, and his disciple Henri after him, filled the whole South with their doctrine. They seem to have been men of God, who preached the study of the Scriptures, rejecting the baptism of infants, and the magical effect of the sacraments of Rome; and their labours were connected with the evangelical party, afterwards called Waldenses, rather than with the Cathari; but their popularity, by weakening the influence of the Church, encouraged the resistance of all its other enemies to such an extent, that, in 1119, Pope Calixtus II. thought it necessary to come to Toulouse in person, and hold a Council, which anathematized the various classes of heretics, ordered the secular power to proceed against them, and condemned as their accomplices all who should venture to defend them. In 1147, Alberic, Cardinal of Ostia and Legate of Eugenius III., accompanied St. Bernard through the South of France, in order to preach against heretics: they found the churches deserted, the Priests dismissed or neglected, the people of the towns especially and the nobles given to heresy; and the latter, even when not belonging themselves to any of the reigning sects, protected them against the persecution of the higher